A federal appeals court on Friday put the NFL back on the hook in the long-running "Sunday Ticket" case, which accuses the league of overcharging DirecTV customers for out-of-market games. The Ninth Circuit reinstated the jury's finding that the league broke antitrust law, but it also kept the trial judge's order throwing out the jury's roughly $4.7 billion damages award. A new jury will now decide how much the league owes.
For the people and bars who paid for the package, that means the claim is alive again, and no money is coming yet.
What the court decided
The case covers Sunday Ticket subscribers from June 2011 to February 2023, when DirecTV held the exclusive rights to sell out-of-market Sunday games. The subscribers argued that the NFL's deals with CBS, Fox and DirecTV limited how those games were sold and pushed up the price of the package.
A jury in Los Angeles agreed and awarded about $4.61 billion to a class of more than 24 million residential subscribers and about $97 million to roughly 507,000 commercial subscribers, such as bars and restaurants. The trial judge then threw out the verdict, ruling that the subscribers' two economists should not have been allowed to testify, and ordered a new trial on damages as a fallback.
The three-judge appeals panel said the judge went too far in excluding the experts. Opinions that can be attacked on cross-examination are still admissible, the court wrote, and the judge had gone past checking the experts' methods and data. With that testimony restored, the liability verdict stands.
Why the damages still have to be retried
The panel agreed with the trial judge that the jury's math did not hold up. The awards match, almost to the cent, the number of subscribers in each class multiplied by $191.26. That figure is the gap between the 2018 and 2019 residential list price of $294 and one expert's estimate that residential subscribers paid about $102.74 a season on average. The court noted that list prices ran from $200 to nearly $400 a season before DirecTV's discounts, and that commercial customers paid, on average, far more than households, which the jury's formula ignored.
The trial court had found that award to be "based on speculation or guesswork," and the appeals court said ordering a new damages trial was within its discretion.
What else the ruling changes
In a separate memorandum filed the same day, the panel upheld the certification of the subscriber classes seeking damages, rejecting the league's challenge. It also told the trial court to decide whether the subscribers' request for a court order against the league's practices is now moot, since the NFL's contract with DirecTV has expired.
The case goes back to the federal court in Los Angeles. The ruling does not set a date for the new damages trial, and it does not decide how much, if anything, individual subscribers will eventually receive.
